Business software sector to hit $267bn

Growth of 8.2% will see the global market for business software "burst into life" this year to a total value of $267bn, say technology analysts Ovum. And it says that, after not growing last year, the sector's compound annual growth rate (CAGR) will be 7.7% for four years to reach revenues of $358bn.
Ovum's chief analysts Tim Jennings said: "As the global economy continues its recovery, the emphasis on IT investment is moving from the traditional area of back-office automation and transaction processing towards the exploitation of information to add value to the business."

Data value

It's information management software that will see the biggest revenue increases, according to Ovum's analysis. The strand will grow at a CAGR of around 10% between 2010 and 2015 as businesses cope with increasing amounts of data and the challenge of extracting business value from it.

Growth across the sector will be "driven by exploding volumes of data, increased enterprise mobility, the transition to cloud computing models, and the emerging markets" says Ovum. Business intelligence and analytics are going to become more important.

Microsoft

Ovum has also released a new set of vendor rankings which puts Microsoft firmly in the number one spot, but which also carries a warning for the software giant. Microsoft's revenues in 2010 were $62bn, and Ovum says the "huge mass and velocity" it has gained over the last 20 years "looks set to sustain the company in the short and medium term".

However, it says, "its level of innovation is not keeping pace with the rest of the market – it is doing just enough to stay in the game, but is not a star performer."

Cloud computing

The analysis also says the growth of cloud computing over the next five years will move organisations "further towards a software as a service model" and lead to the development of a "hybrid public and private cloud infrastructure". This, it says, "will generate new demand for both infrastructure and application services."

Finally, the analysis says emerging markets "have an insatiable appetite for technology-driven expansions, often unencumbered by the constraints of peers in mature markets". This provides vendors with "significant opportunities".